What happens in the event horizon stays in the event horizon
Here’s a really fascinating TED talk where Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel explain how they’ve used Google’s book digitization effort to identify cultural trends:
What’s really interesting is that their work resulted in the Google Labs tool Books Ngram Viewer which is like Google Trends, only for books, and dating back to year 1500. For instance, it looks like things aren’t as wonderful and glorious as they once were:
Early-1971, in an effort to attract as many youngsters to the premises as possible, Marguerite Hart — children’s librarian at the newly-opened public library in Troy, Michigan — wrote to a number of notable people with a request: to reply with a congratulatory letter, addressed to the children of Troy, in which the benefits of visiting such a library were explained in some form. It’s heartening to know that an impressive 97 people did exactly that.
Here’s Isaac Asimov’s reply:
Transcript:
16 March 1971
Dear Boys and Girls,
Congratulations on the new library, because it isn’t just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you—and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.
(Signed, ‘Isaac Asimov’)
Isaac Asimov
More replies from other authors at Letters of Note and the City of Troy.
via Letters of Note
Source: City of Troy
This is one of my favorite short stories by Isaac Asimov (from multiVAX):
© 1956 Isaac Asimov
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:
Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.
Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough — so Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share In the glory that was Multivac’s.
For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth’s poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.
But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.